


Paradox Tissue

by Dorkangel



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, CIA-related trauma, Families of Choice, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, In Which The Rowdy 3 Find And Adopt Child!Dirk, Martin is such a dad, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-Canon, Project Blackwing (Dirk Gently), Sixteen years earlier, Svlad Cjelli - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-20 12:12:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9490496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: It should be dark. It should be punishingly cold, wind should blind him, sinister branches should snap in his face. The night should be all-consuming, should swallow him up whole as he runs and spit him out shuddering like some tragic Victorian heroine.But it isn’t dark: the sun has only just about finished making its lazy way under the distant horizon, and the summer twilight is both warm and bright enough to see by. When he glances up he can almost admire, with desperately watering eyes, the rich blue of the wide sky.As far as he’s concerned, this is because the universe isawful.*A boy in the desert, four mad guys in a van, and the will of the universe.





	1. Icarus

**Author's Note:**

> “If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.” - Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
> 
> Think of this AU as just an off-shoot, a possible universe in which it had scarred up a little differently and taken Dirk down a different path. Trigger warnings in the end notes of Chapter One

It should be dark. It should be punishingly cold, wind should blind him, sinister branches should snap in his face. The night should be all-consuming, should swallow him up whole as he runs and spit him out shuddering like some tragic Victorian heroine.

But it isn’t dark: the sun has only just about finished making its lazy way under the distant horizon, and the summer twilight is both warm and bright enough to see by. When he glances up he can almost admire, with desperately watering eyes, the rich blue of the wide sky.

As far as he’s concerned, this is because the universe is _awful_. It’s an asshole. It doesn’t care that there’s a frightened boy scrambling as fast as his shaky, spindly legs can carry him through what might, generously, be called a wilderness just off the interstate.

“Don’t do this,” he gasps, probably inaudible, probably pointlessly, into the uncaring evening. “Don’t do this, please-”

There’s the snarl of an engine somewhere far closer than it was the last time he could hear it, and he whimpers, indeliberately. The ground beneath him is sharper than it has any right to be, really; _maybe it’s because of my shoes,_ he thinks, which makes sense only to him, because he has no shoes and hasn’t as long as he cares to remember. Out of desperation, he speeds up; out of exhaustion, he then immediately slows down again, and this time exponentially. The boy is tired enough that the ground beneath him, for once, becomes more than a blur, and he realises with a little jolt like the shock of two conductive wires meeting why it feels sharp. Rocks, little sharp ones: _gravel._ He’s been running on gravel for god knows how long.

 _No choice_ , he decides – again, incomprehensible to an outsider, but he’s learned over the years how to think in the utter abstract. It helps him, thinking non-linearly, to understand the seemingly unpredictable nature of an erratic universe; it’s also by design, so as to shield his intentions from the only outsiders who would be in his head in the first place. _No choice. Sorry, Svlad._

Svlad is him, the boy is Svlad, they’re the same person. Internally referring to himself in the third person is not a self-defence mechanism. It’s more of a habit developed due to the fact that, for a long time now, nobody else has been calling him that: instead, they’ve been addressing him as-

“Icarus!”, comes a yell through the night, still faint but way too near. It’s coloured not with anger but amusement, bending up at the end like a howl.

He struggles up again and veers off to the left, towards the lights of what he thinks might be a gas station. Better to try for help than to just let them get him. It must be. Something is telling him so, anyway, even if it’s not true, and who is he to contravene the will of the universe?

 

*

 

If you don’t do what the universe wants, it punishes you. This is a fact. This is not the kind of fact that the CIA had wanted Svlad to know, nor the kind he’d been taught in school, both of which would have been more explicable and less vague: by trial and _painful_ error, he’d taught it to himself. There’s a path, a net of connections, and when you stray from the path or obstruct the connections the universe uses its wide array of proverbial sticks to deter you from trying it again.

Unfortunately, the CIA’s interests are rarely congruent with those of the universe, and they have much the same methods of correction.

He has to choose who he’s going to obey – or, he _had_ to, and he suspects that if he doesn’t run fast enough soon it’s all going to happen again – feeling like a feather tossed around in a hurricane between the two contrasting sets of orders, between armed men yelling in his ears and the net of connections bright behind his eyes. That was why he ran at all; why he kicked a stray paper beneath a door as he was marched past, which was slipped on by one of the guards, whose keyring failed to close properly after he landed on it, meaning after a few days one of the keys would fall off and be found by one of the minor and less-monitored Blackwing subjects, who opened not only her cell but seven others, allowing the resulting escapees to cause enough havoc that Svlad was able to slip away.

Anyway. It’s the fear of what he doesn’t doubt are retrieval agents behind him that keeps him running, but the overpowering fear of the universe’s wrath ahead that directs him towards the lights no matter how much it hurts his lungs and his legs and his feet. _I’ll look weird somewhere so normal_ , he tells himself, and ignores it because he has to. The plain white t-shirt and matching white trousers look like a uniform, the outfit’s neutrality a sheer contrast to what it means to him. They may as well have printed **property of the US government** on his back in big, angry letters – he’s pretty sure **ICARUS** is stamped on the inside of his collar. How ripped and dirty the clothes are bring the tiniest smile to the boy’s face amid the panic, though: it’s a significant little rebellion, nature corrupting its enforced sterility.

He runs as far as he can, until he can only walk. Walking is almost worse: he has enough breath left to cry at the pain in his feet, hiccupping helpless sobs, and without his blood pounding in his ears so much he listens franticly for the engine sounds and the yells. He can’t hear anything and he tries to be relieved at that.

It’s by the time that the lights of the gas station are close, close enough that he can almost read the billboard by the pumps, that he begins to get a hunch that there’s absolutely no one there. And Svlad knows better than to ignore his hunches.

For a moment, it stops him in his tracks – literally. Just standing there, the lonely, skinny figure of a boy in the desert, shoeless, tear-stained, lost.

 _Keep going,_ says the insistent little compass inside.

 _Surrender yourself now_ , says the conditioning, _there’s no hope._

 _Do whatever you have to, Icarus_ , says the quieter, gentler voice of the one man in the facility who had been... well, if not kind, then something close to it.

He steels himself for the sake of the Colonel and follows his instincts, runs to the dark windows of the gas station. The concrete ground feels almost soft against his soles in comparison to the grit and gravel he’d been on just a minute ago, but the coolness of it even despite the summer twilight makes him shudder, brings up all-too recent memories of cold, clean corridors. Svlad hasn’t seen one of these in a very long time, and the ones he used to see were very different, but he knows that there’s usually a guy sitting behind the window with the sliding glass, so that’s where he tries first, banging on it with his fists.

“Help me!”

His voice, not whispering, is higher than he thought it would be, and with the accent he’s never managed to lose. In the silence, it makes him kind of jump.

“Help me! Help – please, somebody...”

He trails off. There’s no reply: there won’t be one. He’s sure of it. There’s no one coming for him

Except, of course, the obvious.

As though on cue – _because the universe is the worst_  – the rev of that same engine cuts through the night like the roar of some hungry beast, and Svlad’s knees buckle under him. Collapsing just under the gateway he’d expected to find help through has something of an irony about it that he finds about as amusing as a punch to the gut; like a punch to the gut, too, it tears the breath from his throat in a brief, harsh sob.

All he can think of to do is curl up as small as possible, like if he does he’ll somehow disappear and they won’t be able to find him. It feels like there’s a belt pulled too tight around his chest, like there’s a filter in his windpipe, like whatever it is going on is extremely wrong and he can’t get nearly enough oxygen in. He’s floating somewhere above his body in the still-clear sky, not Svlad struggling for breath but some observer watching the boy cry – an agent, probably, with some agenda they won’t tell him and he has to figure out to make it all stop. They did that, sometimes.

He can hear the buzz of the engine now like a wasp right in his ear, close, but when he forces himself to look out through splayed figures there’s not even the slightest hint of the glaring headlights he expects. _Behind_ , he thinks, in a numb voice that reaches over the panic of _they’re gonna get me, gonna hurt me, gonna put me back in a maze and make me do crazy things and, and, and, and._ Whoever’s chasing him is on the other side of the station; they must have an off-road.

It gets impossibly loud, until it almost drowns out his thoughts, and then it cuts out. Svlad can’t bring himself to do anything but bury his head in his arms. There’s the sharp thud of a door slamming. Howls and hoots lit up with triumph and –

“You can’t run, Icarus! You can’t hide!”

The voice is low, rough like they haven’t spoken in a long time either, like they’ve spent too long just screaming.

“Can’t run, can’t hide!” joins another voice, equally joyful, but higher and breaking. With it is someone else’s manic laughter, and the sound of what might be glass smashing.

“We can sniff you out,” growls another one. “We know where you are, smell your fear.”

Running footsteps, closer and closer and closer and he can’t breathe at all, can’t see even when he opens his eyes –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Svlad is clearly very traumatised by his time with Blackwing, he has a panic attack and faints.


	2. Martin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter. Like, really short.

Icarus faints, and they feel him do it. Little one is kicking over stores of ice as he goes, laughing, while Gripps and Cross run ahead. Martin threw them his crowbar, and Cross already had a bat: they’re free again, and that’s _free_ meaning _free to wreak havoc._ Free not like a sparrow is free, free like a _hurricane_ is free.

“You smell that, boys?” he snarls. “So scared he dropped out.”

With his rowdies around him like the whirlwind that they are, Martin is unstoppable; he knows it, and he wears it on his face as he stalks forward, swinging his bat in his hand. He used to hear the agents back in that hellhole bitch about his smile, which was, of course, because they didn’t get it. _Ain’t a smile_ , he used to think, vicious, just managing to keep the words behind his teeth. _It’s me baring my fangs._

“Looks like someone’s given you the fucking fright of-” he starts to crow as he leads them round the corner to what they’ve been looking for since the minute they busted free, their revenge, the last cornerstone of their liberation.

But he’s not there.

There’s nobody, nothing there, in fact. There’s the empty pumps and the shop, and no one, and something begins to feel very, very wrong.

He can still sense Icarus somewhere close nearby, and he knows the other two – other _three,_ he needs to remember that, ‘cause they got the little one now and he’s just as wild as the rest of them – can too. It’s Gripps that has the best nose for this kind of thing, and so it’s Gripps that he glances to.

Gripps, who seems to have just experienced the mental equivalent of running face-first into a steel lamppost.

“Oh no,” rumbles Gripps, and Martin, even with no context and no idea what it is, thinks _oh hell no_ and follows his friend’s gaze –

– To the limp figure of a little boy in dirtied white. He’s small, the kid, like he might be tall if he’s given room but he’s never had enough to be anything more than thin; smaller even than the little one currently bouncing, wide-eyed, at Martin’s elbow.

That kid is both precisely what they were looking for and precisely the opposite.

Martin sees red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just guessing, and this totally isn't based on the actors' ages, but I've got everyone as:
> 
> Svlad: 12  
> Vogel: 10  
> Cross: 19  
> Gripps: 21  
> Martin: 29
> 
> Which would make them 28, 26, 35, 37, and 45 respectively during the show. I'm guessing Todd is maybe a bit older than Dirk, and Amanda is a year or two younger than Vogel, but I don't know.
> 
> (I'm going with the idea that the the Rowdy Three has a misnomer because Vogel was added to the group later, as it seems most canonically likely)


	3. Subject Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm countering the shortness of Chapter Three with this, which is more than half the length of the fic so far.

When Svlad comes to consciousness, he does so as a drowning man comes to air – desperately, but without strength. A choked-off kind of cry escapes him before he think to can contain it, and it takes him a moment to realise why he’d want to scream: the desert, the running, the gas station, the inherent awfulness of the universe... they seem relatively unimportant to him, somehow, like there’s a far more imperative threat in his life. He wonders briefly if he is getting this impression from one of the ‘periods of high extrasensory perception’ that the CIA used to blather on about all the time – and then he gets it.

He’s in the dark in a moving vehicle, and that has not ever been a sign of anything good.

Fortunately, before Svlad has a chance to start panicking, there’s movement right by him, and two wild-looking eyes and a big smile seem to materialise.

“Hey, you’re awake!”

The voice sounds oddly familiar. Moreover, it sounds like a child’s voice, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that _they_ haven’t caught up to him again; he knows he’s not the only kid in Blackwing, he sensed it right from the start, and one time as they led him back to his room he saw a tiny figure wearing a muzzle, fuzzy strands of red-blonde hair poking out from the bars she’d been pressing herself against.

What trips him up a little is that the voice sounds _happy_.

 _You’re also not restrained_ , whispers the voice of the universe in Svlad’s head. It sounds like his voice, mostly, but it knows things he doesn’t. _When did the CIA ever put you loose in the back of a van to bounce around? Never._

 _Shut up, shut up, shut up,_ he thinks back. _Is that meant to make up for last night?_

It’s right, of course – it’s always right, it’s only ever Svlad that misinterprets and messes up – but that doesn’t make it forgivable. For a moment he wonders why he’s presuming it’s the next morning, but then the sunlight poking through the _wait is that a bullet hole_ in the roof answers that question.

“You’re not okay, man,” chatters the kid, shaking his head as he does as though to illustrate his point. It makes Svlad feel slightly nauseous. “You’re completely bananas. You pissed your pants last night.”

Svlad, alarmed for a second, looks down. Nothing.

“I did not!”

If they _are_ back with Blackwing, the kid must be very new not to understand how deeply bad it’s going to be: he _laughs_ , a real laugh.

Maybe not so new, though. He glances down at himself, the source of the laughter, as though in surprise.

“Almost.” concedes the kid. His grin is back, one hundred watt bright, and he springs to his feet. “I gotta tell Martin! You’re up – he said to tell him when, I gotta –”

“No!”

The kid pauses, and with his head in the beam of light from the roof Svlad can see that his hair has been shaved, neither completely nor in any kind of pattern at all, seemingly just sort of arbitrarily. It makes him look a little like a manic lemur.

“Where are we?” Svlad tries, throat dry. The kid keeps eye contact with him and says nothing. “Okay. Okay. What’s your name?”

“Martin said we don’t use ‘em anymore.” the kid says, his smile fading into a frown so severe that it furrows his little brow. “He said not to.”

Svlad pulls his knees up to his chest, awkwardly. He’s clearly not going to get anything useful from the other kid.

“I’m Svlad.” he offers.

“...I’m Subject Four.”

‘Subject Four’ is not the right name for this child. The t-shirt he’s wearing is black, not the sterilized white that Blackwing projects wear; admittedly, it practically reaches his knees, but that’s not the point. His hair, his behaviour, his clothes, are not those of a number. Svlad has let himself be number-ish before, when there’s no other option, and it’s about being a robot – clever, but not animal. This kid is not a robot.

There’s a thump like someone jumping down onto the floor of the van – ‘Subject Four’ doesn’t react, even watches the way that Svlad draws nervously back with something like incredulity. The door rolls open, easy, unlocked, light flooding in, and there’s a young guy poking his head around it. It takes just a second too long for Svlad’s eyes to adjust; the guy doesn’t move, luckily. He’s maybe nineteen, with dirty dark hair to his chin and slightly sunken eyes, which don’t connect with either Svlad or the kid.

“Hey, little guy,” he calls, gesturing for Subject Four to come closer. “What’d we say about calling yourself that?”

The kid flashes a grin in response, very brief – Svlad is beginning to suspect that _that_ is not exactly a smile – but hesitates to join the man at the door; it elicits a little head-tilt that is, much like most of the kid’s movements, more of an animalistic action than it is human. The man at the door leans forward with his arm still outstretched, and the open leather jacket he’s wearing shifts a little further open to reveal **0002** printed big on the left breast of his white shirt.

 _Oh_ , Svlad thinks, strangely numb with the realisation. _Subject Two._

And then it strikes him that, _god_ , that’s an adult not wearing a uniform, moving around freely. He’s not sure whether to laugh or break down.

Subject Four lets Subject Two push him, very gently, through to what must be the front of the van: Svlad is reminded inexplicably of the documentaries they’d make him watch sometimes, for educational purposes, of a lioness or a cheetah mother picking up their babies delicately in their jaws to keep them safe. He’s also reminded of what that same careful mother usually does to the nearest prey animal immediately after, too, and of the fact that they’d said they could _smell him_. If they were the ones outside the gas station, of course, which isn’t necessarily so.

Subject Two kind of squints at him.

“You gonna collapse on us again?” he grunts, having apparently been watching Svlad goes through this thought process. Nervously, Svlad shakes his head. “Then up y’get, c’mon.”

Svlad scrambles upright to stand very still, very stiff; it’s a kind of a mockery of a military attention, and it’s what he’s learned is safest to do. At his sides his hands twitch, unsure of whether to fly up behind his head like he would do if the Blackwing agents who opened his room were armed.

Subject Two seems to bite the inside of his cheek, like he’s deeply uncomfortable, and jerks his chin towards the front. He has a ring drawn in black around his left eye – but Svlad has seen a lot of strange things in his thus-far short life, and most of those things didn’t like stares, so he neither looks for too long nor questions it, just does as instructed and walks tremulously forwards.

Svlad doesn’t have any clues on how to feel with the revelation of the rest of the van. It’s a mess, clothes thrown everywhere, and that could mean rogue subjects, yes, or it could mean an emergency within Blackwing, and in both of those situations he’ll need to be very careful to come out okay. The people in the van are tense, and he knows they watch him even though he does his best to look at a spot partially between the far distance and the floor: there’s Subject Two, still standing right behind him; a guy in a furred jacket, maybe a few years older than Subject Two, in the driver’s seat with his eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror, disturbingly; Subject Four, sitting backwards in the passenger seat with his legs wrapped around the back, looking through the gap between the seat and the headrest; and then, leaning forwards on his elbows against his knees, the dark expression above the glasses balanced low on his nose focused like a laser beam on Svlad, is the person clearly in charge. He’s tall, but not gangly so much as _big,_ muscled and sort of broad to balance out his long limbs, and he’s rubbing his badgerish beard in a kind of consideration that feels overly sinister.

Just by instinct Svlad is afraid. The strange thing is that the four of them seem to twitch at the precise moment that he feels fear wash over him.

“Stop.” barks the leader; instantly, the van swerves, and he can’t see out of the blacked-out windows but he suspects by the way that they sort of crash to a sudden stop that they’re in the middle of absolutely nowhere and in a place that was most certainly not intended for regular vehicles. Subject Two grabs Svlad’s elbows, holding him still, and logically he knows it’s to stop him from going flying into the wall, but he still can’t help the way that he tries to cringe away from it and begins to breathe too fast, to shake slightly –

“Out.” snaps the leader.

 _Move_ , says the universe. He ignores it.

The others don’t move.

They look at each other, then at him.

It’s obvious enough that it must be him that the order was intended for, but he doesn’t – _can’t_ – take a step until the leader stands, suddenly, and then he’s all but running to the side door, underestimating the gap between the van and the earth and nearly falling.

“Watch your feet.” comes a grunt behind him, with no emotion, and then the slam of the door. It’s hot out: definitely summer, although he couldn’t tell you the date.

Svlad can’t hear anything or anyone about, but if so much as a raccoon was to pass by, he and the man would be shielded from view on both sides, to his left by a row of dead brush that they must have very narrowly missed and to his immediate right by the van. Anything could happen here, and the neither the others in the van nor any bystanders would know – Svlad glances over the man for weapons and sees nothing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any.

 _Debriefing_ , he tells himself, with an edge of desperation he’s very aware of. _Think of it as a debriefing. One where the agents can_ smell _you because that’s not at all terrifying, and it’s totally not like ‘debriefings’ have never been painful before, god –_

“You don’t call me Subject One.” the man hisses, sharp. He’s pacing back and forth, back and forth, and his hands keep balling and unballing, flitting up to his face and then down again like he can’t decide whether to adjust his glasses. “You don’t call me ‘Oh-One’, you don’t call me Incubus. Understand? Me and my boys, we don’t use those names.”

“Understood.” Svlad says back, quiet and automatic.

“Martin.” Above his glasses, the man frowns, like the name is something he’s readjusting to, like it doesn’t feel like it quite fits yet. “You call me Martin.”

“Yes-” His tongue trips over the ‘sir’, unsaid, and he winces at himself. “-Martin.”

“Stop it.” Martin snaps. “Just – stop it, stop being like _that_ ,”

Unexpectedly, he crouches down so he’s below Svlad’s level, looking up at him with bright black eyes through the glasses, strangely desperate.

“I ain’t calling you it,” he continues, insistent despite the cropped nature of his voice. “Look at you, you’re only tiny. You ain’t –”

All the threads meet for just an instant behind Svlad’s eyes, and he understands.

“Icarus. I’m not Icarus. But, I am.”

The expression on Martin’s face hardens.

“Yeah?”

It all makes sense now, he knows it does, and as it often is, however unadvisable, the fear is alleviated by the relief of understanding.

“You recognised me by, um, scent, somehow, but you didn’t think I’d be like _me_ : like, only little. A project, like the four of you.”

Martin stands very abruptly, and Svlad realises with a jump that maybe, possibly, he might have said too much. Again.

“How’d you know –”

“I know things, I just know things,” he babbles, both backtracking and literally stepping back all at once, mouth running just as quickly as his mind. “That’s why they wanted me. I just, I _know_ things, what’s going to happen, what’s meant to happen.”

Martin stares at him, for the most part as impenetrably as always. Svlad swallows his nerves.

“They wanted me to tell them things, connections, about the universe. To make decisions for them.” he continues. “They made you do things based on, on Icarus’s decisions, and that’s why you’re mad, and I understand, but I didn’t mean – it wasn’t on purpose, everything you think I made you do, it wasn’t, I didn’t mean –”

With the sudden, if not to say jerky, movements that seem to be his habit, Martin holds out one finger in the symbol for silence. Svlad, with the one shred of self-preservation he has managed to retain under the influence of the universe and the CIA, shuts up.

“They used you.” he huffs. “Just like they used us. You don’t gotta explain yourself – look at’cha. Played us off against each other, didn’t they?”

Svlad almost wants to cry. The sound of the universe in his head is that of triumphant bells, but he still feels vulnerable and unprotected in his paper-thing clothes, and he’s still shaking with the fight-or-flight adrenaline running through his veins.

“C’mon.”

Martin starts walking back towards the van – there’s something slightly hungry in his eye, something alarming, but Svlad decides that it’s safer to ignore it for the moment. No need to antagonise someone he thinks is offering help.

Right?


	4. Vogel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmao does this advance plot? no. enjoy it anyway.

_PROJECT INCUBUS IS LOOSE_

_PROJECT INCUBUS IS LOOSE_

_PROJECT INCUBUS IS LOOSE_

Vogel taps the rhythm of the words against his knees, impatient. It hasn’t been very long since they were first hurtling towards the van, through what he can only remember as a tunnel of violence, with a voice from the speakers all along the walls shouting them. They stick in his head.

Bang-bang bang-bang-bang bang bang: _pro-ject in-kee-bos is loos._

_SECURE THE AREA_

That one is harder to drum; more syllables, in unexpected places. He tries for a moment, then gives up, and thinks back to what Subject One’s voice had been yelling above all the other words as they bust out.

_NO MORE CAGES_

_NO MORE CAGES_

_NO MORE CAGES_

It’s not a challenge at all. Bang bang bang-bang. Same rhythm as the other thing Subject One had said as they made that first dash through squeaky-clean corridors and big concrete courtyards, Vogel trailing behind on shorter legs; he’d turned and grabbed his hand to pull him along faster and when Vogel had tried to ask where they were going and called him ‘Oh-One’ like the Colonel called him, he’d said:

_“Call me Martin.”_

Those three words are more important than any of the crap out of the mouths of the doctors – he thinks they were doctors, anyway; they wore white coats, and they wanted to learn how his body and his mind work – or those guys in black that Oh-Three (no, not Oh-Three, Cross, like criss-cross, that’s what he says his name is) calls ‘feds’. Martin’s the _boss._ Martin’s the coolest, the craziest, the smartest, the tallest. Martin knows what’s best to do.

Vogel, with a firm sense that what Martin says is of far greater important than _anything_ , stops drumming and takes up banging the toe of his boot against the metal walls of the van.

 _NO MORE CAGES_ bang bang bang-bang _CALL ME MARTIN_ bang bang bang-bang –

“Shh,” sighs Gripps, distracted. It’s easy for Vogel to remember _his_ name, – whenever he forgets, Gripps grabs him up in a bear hug and bellows “M’Grippin’ you, little rowdy!”

“Can you smell them?” he whispers. Whispering counts as shushing, right?

The scent of whatever’s going on will be why Cross and Gripps are staring so hard at the wall – they can’t be doing it for the same reason they used to at the facility, which was to scare the agents on the other side of what had looked like a mirror but they said was really glass.

“Yeah,” murmurs Cross, real quiet. “Can’t hear ‘em, though.”

“Smells scared.” says Gripps.

“Smells real scared.”

“He always smells scared.” puts in Vogel; the way that they both glance towards in surprise had got to be because of them forgetting that, nevermind that he’s younger and he’s not as good at sensing stuff as them, he was a part of the project for just the same reason.

“Didn’t at the cage.” objects Cross in something of a grunt. It’s a _shut up, kiddo_ , loud and clear, and Vogel hears it but he ignores it. You gotta do that, sometimes: the Three are always saying so. You gotta get bruised sometimes, and you gotta wear your wounds with pride ‘cause they’re medals of how you rebelled, how you didn’t let the assholes in the white coats control you. Or at least, they say so, but when Vogel really _really_ didn’t want to go into an even littler cage with some mean-looking dogs and he’d gotten his limbs all scratched up and his ankles twisted painfully trying to keep back from them, Martin had carried him around and stood between him and the feds for weeks, not like he was proud. More like he was worried.

He guesses that’s ‘cause Martin’s the boss, though.

At the cage, he hadn’t thought of Icarus as another little boy: none of them had. Icarus was a project, yes, but he was a special case, he was working with the enemy. He had to have been a grown-up because that was too devious a thing for a kid to be doing. He was one of the liars who were so tricksy that Vogel would get caught up in their lies and not know who to believe until he’d look through the bars at the others and see Gripps shake his head at them as they spoke. They’d never seen Icarus, but they _knew_.

 _He’s the Colonel’s pet_ , Cross had snarled once as they were dragged past the cell marked **ICARUS** , _his little favourite._ Vogel had craned his neck, but he wasn’t tall enough to see through the slot on the door, and the agents had wanted them to move. He’d imagined Icarus as sort of like the Colonel, though, if not so old: a white guy, blonde, falsely innocuous blue eyes, the pretence of warmth while using you, hurting you, taking you apart piece by piece to see how you tick, making you hurt other people.

They knew very acutely that when it was hurting other people it was done on information from Icarus. They memorised the scent of the emotions he left all over the orders passed onto them so that they could sense him in every hoop they were made to jump through. And then, when they were free, after wrecking a couple of buildings, they tracked down the source of the scent to visit vengeance upon it.

“I think he must’ve.” says Vogel. “I think we was just so hungry that we didn’t care.”

Cross doesn’t like eye contact. He’s a twitchy guy, he’s not the best at facing up to other people when it’s not in a fight, when quick glances and hair-trigger reflexes are actually an aid. But he glances over Vogel’s furrowed little serious expression, then nods to Gripps, and that means he almost definitely agrees. _Victory_. He beams and kicks the wall one last time with the thrill of the older – and sure, smarter and more knowing and all – two acknowledging his contributions, and he’s pretty sure he bruises his toe.

And then Gripps nods sharp towards the door, and maybe a second flat Vogel and Cross get themselves back to their seats, lighting quick. Martin’s the best boss ever. But knowing that doesn’t undo the way that the last few years have torn down any single shred of trust in authority that any of they might have started with.

“Y’all ain’t subtle.” sighs his voice from outside; _oh yeah_ , Vogel remembers with a start, _he gets it too. He knows how we do._ When the door opens he has this expression on that must either mean that he’s staring directly into the sun (and last time Vogel checked, the sun was up in the sky, not inside their van) or he’s exasperated and kind of worried. By his side, the boy – _Svlad-Icarus-Whatever_ – shivers and stares, much as he has been doing, but Vogel doesn’t think he’s so scared as he was. He doesn’t stink so bad of fear, anyway.

Cross slowly tilts his head to the side, somewhere between curious and challenging. Gripps huffs and turns the key in the ignition.

Vogel just grins. He might not have the same crazy knowledge Icarus does about fate and the universe and those massive great forces at play in the world – in fact, his only real consideration of them is as a block between him and fun – but he gets a sense, sometimes, a little glimpse behind the veil he only knows is there because of Blackwing. And when Icarus accepts a hand up and lets himself be hauled up inside the van, something just feels _right_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT 03.16.2017: This was not intended to be the end of this work, and yet. I couldn't find a way to continue it.  
> I do plan to continue this AU as a series, though! I'll discuss why the others don't know Vogel's name, and stuff like that, in the next instalment.
> 
> Come harass me if you want? I'm unseeliecosette on tumblr.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm implying that Svlad still named himself "Dirk Gently" because a name that means "stab, softly" is so fucking in character


End file.
